The Schopenhauer Cure(64)
Caroline sued him, claiming that she was pushed down the stairs and suffered grievous injury resulting in trembling and partial paralysis. Arthur was highly threatened by the lawsuit: he knew that he was unlikely ever to earn money from his scholarly pursuits and had always fiercely guarded the capital inherited from his father. When his money was imperiled he became, in the words of his publisher, “a chained dog.”
Certain that Caroline Marquet was an opportunistic malingerer, he fought her lawsuit with all his might, employing every possible legal appeal. The bitter court proceedings continued for the next six years before the court ruled against him and ordered him to pay Caroline Marquet sixty talers a year for as long as her injury persisted. (In that era a house servant or cook would have been paid twenty talers annually plus food and board.) Arthur’s prediction that she was shrewd enough to tremble as long as the money rolled in proved accurate; he continued to pay for her support until she died twenty-six years later. When he was sent a copy of her death certificate he scrawled across it: “Obit anus, abit onus” (the old woman dies, the burden is lifted).
And other women in Arthur’s life? Arthur never married but was far from chaste: for the first half of his life he was highly sexually active, perhaps even sexually driven. When Anthime, his childhood friend from Le Havre, visited Hamburg during Arthur’s apprenticeship, the two young men spent their evenings searching for amorous adventures, always with women from lower social strata—maids, actresses, chorus girls. If they were unsuccessful in their search, they ended their evening by consoling themselves in the arms of an “industrious whore.”
Arthur, lacking in tact, charm, and joie de vivre, was an inept seducer and needed much advice from Anthime. His many rejections ultimately caused him to link sexual desire with humiliation. He hated being dominated by the sexual drive and in subsequent years had much to say about the degradation of sinking to animalistic life. It was not that Arthur didn’t want women; he was clear about that: “I was very fond of them—if only they would have had me.”
The saddest of love stories in the Schopenhauer chronicles took place when he was forty-three and attempted to court Flora Weiss, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl. One evening at a boating party he approached Flora with a bunch of grapes and informed her of his attraction to her and his intention of speaking to her parents about marriage. Later, Flora’s father was taken aback by Schopenhauer’s proposal and responded, “But she is a mere child.” Ultimately, he agreed to leave the decision to Flora. The business came to an end when Flora made it clear to all concerned that she vehemently disliked Schopenhauer.
Decades later, Flora Weiss’s niece questioned her aunt about that encounter with the famous philosopher and, in her diary, quoted her aunt as saying, “Oh, leave me in peace about this old Schopenhauer.” When pressed for more information, Flora Weiss described Arthur’s gift of the grapes and said, “But I didn’t want them, you see. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them. And so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.”
There is no evidence that Arthur ever had a love affair with a woman whom he respected. His sister, Adele, after receiving a letter in which Arthur reported “two love affairs without love,” responded, in one of their few interchanges about his personal life, “May you not totally lose the ability to esteem a woman while dealing with the common and base ones of our sex and may Heaven one day lead you to a woman to whom you can feel something deeper than these infatuations.”
At thirty-three Arthur entered into an intermittent ten-year liaison with a young Berlin chorus girl named Caroline Richter-Medon, who often carried on affairs with several men simultaneously. Arthur had no objections to that arrangement and said, “For a woman, limitation to one man during the short time of her flowering is an unnatural state. She is expected to save for one what he cannot use and what many others desire from her.” He was opposed to monogamy for men as well: “Man at one time has too much and in the long run too little…. half their lives men are whoremongers, half cuckolds.”
When Arthur moved from Berlin to Frankfurt, he offered to take Caroline with him but not her illegitimate son, whom he insisted was not his. Caroline refused to abandon her child, and after a short correspondence their relationship ended for good. Even so, Arthur, almost thirty years later, at the age of seventy-one, added a codicil to his will leaving Caroline Richter-Medon five thousand talers.
Though he often scorned women and the entire institution of matrimony, Arthur vacillated about marriage. He cautioned himself by reflecting, “All great poets were unhappily married and all great philosophers stayed unmarried: Democritus, Descartes, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. The only exception was Socrates—and he had to pay for it, for his wife was the shrewish Xanthippe…. most men are tempted by the outward appearance of women, that hides their vices. They marry young and pay a high price when they get older for their wives become hysterical and stubborn.”
As he aged he gradually relinquished the hope of marriage and gave up the idea completely at the age of forty. To marry at a late age, he said, was comparable to a man traveling three-fourths of the journey by foot and then deciding to buy the costly ticket for the whole journey.
All of life’s most fundamental issues come under Schopenhauer’s bold philosophical scrutiny, and sexual passion, a topic avoided by his philosophic predecessors, was no exception.